The present invention relates in general to firearms, and in particular to a firearm made from a molded diamond material.
From shotguns to rifles to handguns, firearms have proven to be a valuable tool for law enforcement and self defense. Sadly, however, firearms have also proven to be a valuable tool for criminals, who use them to threaten, injure, or murder their victims. Too often, the criminals cannot be identified, either because the weapon that fired a bullet cannot be reliably identified or because the weapon was stolen from its owner and the shooter cannot be reliably connected to the weapon. In addition, many people are injured or killed each year through accidental discharge of firearms, including children playing with a parent's gun.
Attempts to solve these problems include trigger locks and ballistic fingerprinting. While they are of some help, both solutions are imperfect. Trigger locks, for example, keep unauthorized users (particularly children) from operating a firearm, but they can also interfere with legitimate users' ability to respond quickly to a deadly threat. Further, because a criminal can steal a firearm and remove the lock at his or her leisure, trigger locks do little to prevent stolen firearms from being used in further crimes.
Ballistic fingerprinting attempts to match grooves imparted to a bullet by a gun barrel to the barrel of a particular firearm. The technique is sometimes successful; however, it has been demonstrated that over time, the grooves imparted by a particular barrel can change (e.g., due to wear and tear if the gun is repeatedly fired); moreover, firearms manufacturers generally do not design their barrels to provide a unique signature, so differences are largely accidental, making ballistic fingerprinting, at best, an inexact science.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide firearms with improved protection against unauthorized use and improved ability to identify a particular firearm as the source of a bullet.